The present invention relates to a gun firing mechanism.
Various types of gun firing mechanisms are available, principally relying on a spring biased firing pin which is urged against the primer charge of a cartridge upon the gun trigger being pressed. Such mechanisms have evolved over the past several hundred years. From the time of early percussion weapons to the present, firing mechanisms of fire arms have utilized pivoting hammers and the aforementioned spring loaded firing pins. Even free floating firing pins have been used, activated by the release of a striking member which by impact with a detonating charge is designed to prime the explosive charge to ignite it and in so doing to propel the bullet from the weapon by the force of pressure generated in the resultant explosion of the charge. Efforts have been made to improve the marksman's capabilities by providing weapons designed for greater accuracy and in particular target rifles and pistols. These have been proposed with various electronic means of hammer release which have been designed to remove the effort of activating the actual firing function means and thereby reduce movement away from the target in sighting the weapon.
Target pistols and rifles of earlier conventional designs suffered in accuracy due to the friction experienced in the cocking sear of the hammer and the effort required to release the hammer to fire the weapon. Hardened surfaces at these points in the mechanism of conventional weapons have been frequently painstakingly polished to give the smoothest possible movement on activation in firing the weapon.
The weight of the hammer and firing pin has also often been minimized to avoid as much as possible the extended effect of the actuating momentum of these when released to fire the weapon since it adds yet another movement at the crucial moment of aim and detonation.
Electronic trigger releases in some target weapons have been suggested to avoid the effort of hammer release but these have not replaced the spring tension activation of the hammer and firing pin.
Some electrical gun firing mechanisms have, however, been proposed. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,250,034 (E. P. Simmons), an electrically controlled gun firing mechanism has an electromagnet which when energized on the operation of the gun trigger attracts an armature against a spring bias. The armature has a firing pin forming an axial extension so that on such movement of the armature the firing pin will detonate a shell, the bias of the spring then returning the armature and firing pin to the inoperative position. The energizing of the electromagnet is by the discharge through the electromagnet coil of a charged capacitive circuit in conjunction with the current from a D.C. power source. In this prior art proposal, however, the armature in its inoperative position is already located Within the coil of the electromagnet. The energising of the electromagnet only moves the armature further within the coil. Also, in both the operated and unoperated positions of the armature, the firing pin or at least a portion thereof (a lesser portion after the armature has been moved) is always present within the coil of the electromagnet.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,009,536 (Wolff) an elongate firing pin extends through the coil of an electromagnet to be connected at one end to a movable armature and to extend at its opposite end towards a cartridge against which it, or an intermediate striking lever, will impact upon movement of the armature on energization of the coil. In the embodiment for an automatic firearm Wolff proposes a supplementary electromagnet which is energized to move a supplementary armature out of a firing pin locking position concurrently with the energization of the main armature, a spring bias then returning the supplementary armature to its firing pin locking position. In both these embodiments of Wolff, however, the major portion of the firing pin is always contained within the electromagnetic coil, only a part of the firing pin moving out of the coil at one end upon attraction of the movable armature at the other end.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,134,223 (Hillenbrandt et al) an electromagnetic coil has positioned within it a movable armature connected at one end with a firing pin. Upon energisation of the electromagnet the movement of the armature will move an end of the firing pin out of the coil to impact on a cartridge. The energisation of the coil is proposed to be by the discharge of a storage capacitor actuated by the operation of the trigger triggering a light-sensitive device.
Such prior art proposals for an electrical trigger mechanism, while having many advantages over normal spring-biased firing pin mechanisms, have still not achieved a sufficiently fast triggering time nor in automatic weapons a sufficiently fast return of the firing pin to its rest position.
It is an object of the present invention to thus provide an electrical gun firing mechanism which enables a faster triggering time to be achieved and which overcomes or at least obviates disadvantages in trigger mechanisms available to the present time.
Further objects of this invention will become apparent from the following description.